A glimpse of the issues on which the pundits pour out their ponderings and the papers get their textures from tells a lot.
Let’s talk, for example, about the options we here in Nepal have.
I could have started writing about the constitution-making, again. But that’s been done enough. As one of my friends tells me, people are jaded now. The same old party politics and same old pontifications, predictions and prophecies. So that is a strict no-no.
I could have tried to pour out around a thousand words about people throwing away a dictatorship – in a similar to our own People’s Movement kind of rebellion – in a distant country whose name I heard for the first time recently. I even started this, instigated by the way it dominated global media, but frankly, did not have the courage to conclude optimistically on behalf of those people – far away yet so near, different yet so like us.
I want to admit honestly – I sometimes feel, the optimism portrayed by the intelligentsia is their effort to reassure themselves. About the state of their country, about the world in general and their say in it.
Often – as proved in case of Nepal – in vain.
For me, I think it will be difficult to prove to my editors that Afghanistan’s soiled politics and my opinion on that is of deep implications for us. It’s more difficult to make people read it. I feel jealous of the opinionators of some superpower papers. For the people empowered to police the world, anything under the sky and above is ‘their’ concern. But we are slightly away from that stature in the globe to make these things ‘our concern’. So I roll back. Of course, one can always add a twist in the tale and connect it to what matters here with some play of words, but sometimes my honesty cripples me.
A genuine dilemma emerges thus. For us, our own real concerns seem like distant issues not related to us in any proximity of time and space.
Who, after all, wants to talk about education and morality when the all important debate of the constitution is yet to be solved? It’s a different matter though that the country’s education system is in deep peril and starting from primary level, quality teaching is a rarity. Teaching, as a profession is the last option for educated youth. That is what it shouldn’t be like. But that is exactly what it is like. Nobody can overemphasize the role of teaching in shaping up the society. But why and how this once revered profession has managed to slither down the preferences is not to be discussed here. At least, not imminently.
It’s no surprise that these and many other important issues rarely get some space in our newspapers. Looking just at one day’s spread in the newspapers around the world can make us feel the difference. A sixty something, kind and wise-looking spectacled columnist commenting about the correct method of parenting seems aptly in place. Another man writing about the heroism of day to day people seems pretty natural. Elsewhere.
We cannot blame the intelligentsia for this contrast that we feel from outside. Looking at opiniosphere around the world and comparing with what we get is depressing. But, we get what we produce. Others elsewhere unlike us are free to write. That freedom emerges from the context of a solid structure, a foothold. A society moving on a defined path gives them a confidence that they can make a difference. The diverse creativity is a result of this certainty that the course correction they are offering will have an impact. This is missing every time I want to say what I want to say. What else is there otherwise for a writer than the motivation that he can change the world for better?
In a discussion with the same friend who said people have got jaded, when I asked what a mere thinker can do in such a situation, I got this answer – ‘Give hope, probably’.
Can we do it? Not sure.
But that is what we want to believe we are doing. Trying to figure out solutions for a society bereft of its youth, for a nation whose politics is betraying it and for a generation that cannot relate to its leaders. Telling people it’s not that bad and things will get better.
The metaphoric magnitude of the events and their historic character has limited our concerns and incapacitated our creativity.
Not so long ago in the past, as a famous writer puts it, the intelligentsia in Kathmandu was hit by a mental paralysis – unable to decipher the events. The situation is slightly different this time. They are incarcerated. After all, imprisonment is nothing but limiting options.
dinkar.nepal@yahoo.com
Related story
Worth of stories
